European technology sector ramps up lobbying push

European tech is also overcoming its allergy to politics. The newest State of European Tech report by Atomico reads not as a scorecard but more as a manifesto, illustrating that startups, scale-ups and funds are coming out of observation mode to promote their own self-interest. The message is clear: the success of a burgeoning tech economy will depend as much on regulatory design as it does on product-market fit.

For startups, lobbying goes mainstream in Europe

For years, founders in Europe treated policy as a quaint backdrop. That’s over. The growth-stage companies are hiring public affairs leads, coordinating open letters and showing up in Brussels with data and draft text, not just complaints. With its four-point agenda — Fix the Friction, Fund the Future, Empower Talent, Champion Risk — Atomico’s case comes into sharp focus as hard facts married with strong asks.

• Fix the Friction
• Fund the Future
• Empower Talent
• Champion Risk

The push comes with institutional buy-in. Publicly, however, some of Europe’s top EU officials are wooing the sector — with declarations that the future of AI should be made in Europe. That attention has helped spur a more mature industry voice — one that confronts trade-offs and zeroes in on how things should be put into place, not just goals to be committed to in headlines.

The 28th regime becomes a test for company law

The signature battle is the so-called “28th regime” — a pan-European system of company law intended to circumvent the complexity caused by 27 national systems. Advocates like EU-INC and France Digitale say that common rules on incorporation, governance and stock options would both lower legal costs for startups and accelerate their expansion across borders. Equally, Europe’s Startup Nations Alliance has advocated for founder-friendly and streamlined frameworks.

The legal form is the devil. A regulation would have direct effect across the Union; a directive would allow for fragmentation. Atomico and others argue that only the former fixes the problem. Europe tried the same with the Societas Europaea and discovered, to its cost, that partial harmonization is still a transactional maze for companies.

Why it matters: Share options, data residency, terms of employment and reporting rules remain widely divergent, preventing startups from hiring anywhere and selling everywhere. As $100 million European investor Index Ventures has highlighted over and over again, employee option pools in Europe tend to be smaller and more tax-stifled than those many associate with, which suppresses retention at some of the very positions AI-era businesses need.

Capital flows pick up, but unevenly across Europe

Atomico’s results suggest that investment has been showing signs of picking up off the cyclical bottom, with AI having made up a greater proportion of late-stage rounds and corporate participation increasing. In an average year, Europe today pulls in about a fifth of global venture capital — a share that is unlikely to waver through market cycles, but lags the United States on both depth and pace of financing.

Meanwhile, the public markets are the weakest link. The dearth of large tech listings obliges founders to remain private for longer or list outside the country. That’s why lobbyists are linking the 28th regime to wider Capital Markets Union reforms — making passporting for prospectuses simpler, streamlining dual-class structures and calibrating research rules to deepen coverage for mid-cap tech. The European Investment Bank and the European Innovation Council can act on growth, but follow-on private capital needs to ramp up for the flywheel to spin.

Talent mobility and risk appetite in the tech sector

Empower talent is the least controversial and most actionable plank. Entrepreneurs are looking for a standard playbook around stock options, mutual recognition of grants across borders and increased high-skill visas. The patchwork remains, although several countries have modernized their systems. Applied uniformly, on top of the improved Heritage Card and digital identity frameworks, hiring times could be slashed to ribbons.

It’s the harder sell to champion risk. European policymakers are good at ex ante safeguards; innovators are looking for calibrated space to experiment. That involves sandboxes for frontier AI and biotech, outcome-based regulation versus prescriptive rulebooks, and public procurement targets that favor innovative suppliers. The thinking here follows that of long-lived programs like the SBIR in the United States: Use government demand to de-risk new technology without distorting markets.

A new tone in Brussels and abroad for European tech

Crucially, the tone has matured. Instead of alluding to regulation as a barrier, the top startups advocate specific edits and share costed scenarios. When lobbyists call for a regulation over a directive, they don’t just want alacrity; they are looking for some predictability as well (that is what you offer to investors underwriting multi-year product roadmaps). That predictability is a force multiplier for deep tech, where capex and compliance can easily make or break a thesis.

There’s also outreach outside the policy bubble. Companies ranging from Synthesia to DeepL, as well as Klarna, are increasingly articulating how regulation informs their day-to-day user experience — from trust signals in AI products to checkout transparency — a growing need if the technology industry expects broader public backing. Despite anecdotal hope, OECD and Eurostat data suggest that Europe lags its peers in R&D intensity and productivity growth; closing the gap is not a niche founder cause but a broad societal one.

The political risk in getting political for tech

There are risks. If the tech lobby gets too closely identified with one political party family, it could lose ground in the next election cycle. The antidote is radical transparency — making full use of the EU Transparency Register (for comparisons among members of Parliament, see here), avoiding opacity by being open about public consultation submissions and resistance tactics from lobbyists, and combining clear conflict-of-interest policies with a focus on outcomes most people can understand: better jobs, easier services to use and higher-quality public infrastructure.

What success looks like for Europe’s tech lobby

Practically, a win would encompass a bona fide 28th regime on statute as regulation, stock option rules that are aligned and follow workers when they cross borders and startup visas issued in weeks not months; it would also shout loudly about those procurement goals that will see a worthwhile chunk of public spend head towards innovative SMEs. Combine that with deeper late-stage capital pools and Europe’s tech ambition isn’t just a slogan.

Atomico sums it up: Europe is at an inflection point. Its new political fluency does not suggest that it will wait on the corner. It is already writing the signposts — and, more and more, the road rules.